Category Archives: Human Rights Civil Liberties

“When thy intelligence shall cross beyond the whirl of delusion, then shalt thou become indifferent to Scripture heard or that which thou hast yet to hear.” – Bhagavadgita

I keep this passage from the Book of Doctrines close to my heart since I first came across it in the winter of 1991, for I thought it a dangerous passage. Two centuries prior to our beloved Christian movement and some seven to twelve hundred years after Moses first freed the Jews from slavery in Egypt, the Gita was making doctrines obsolete faster than scribes could record them. Or the rich people of those days could typeset, print and distribute them. The ebb of life on the planet was slow and uneven in the third century BCE or we might all be walking about with dots on our foreheads.

I’ve put this off long enough. I’ve enjoyed the fruits and sweetness of a brief entanglement with bliss and despair long enough. It is time that I get down to business, call a spade a spade and then pick up my spade and put it to its intended use. I am done with my creature comforts and of protecting what has yet to be taken, as if what has already been taken has not been egregious enough.

Perhaps I should qualify the comforts I enjoy today, at the edge of this springboard, by mentioning where this journey began for me. Continue reading →

In order for the government to send drones against people they wish to spy on or to attack, they must have GPS-coordinates. Are the people of Boston aware that Lockheed Martin collected their census data?

President Obama authorized the use of drones domestically when he signed FAA Reauthorization Act. They can now be used domestically for a wide range of functions, both public and private, governmental and corporate. And quite definitely against “domestic terrorists.”

Medical marijuana patients in Canada can expect a 50-100% increase in the cost of medication next year, all so that large commercial interests can monopolize the habilitative herb, CBC News reports.

Health Canada has banned private-dwelling production of this 34-million-year-old plant, because the Mounties complained about missing out on taxes for weed sold outside the licensed market. Actually, they called the activity “criminal” because, after all, no matter that the plant is safer and more effective than many lab-drugs, the government criminalized it.

When I think of a “Constitution Day” speech, three things pop into my head.

First, I expect to hear a speech about the greatness of the Constitution and the wisdom of the Founding Fathers.

Second, that speech will likely cover the many ways that today’s Federal government is nothing close to the Founders’ constitutional vision. I’d hear about some of the ways the supreme court has flipped the constitution on its head, and how politicians from both major political parties only care about the constitution when it fits their political goals. They ignore or violate it with impunity when it doesn’t.

Utility companies are replacing electricity, gas and water meters worldwide with new generation “smart” meters at an unprecedented rate. Take Back Your Power investigates the benefits and risks of this ubiquitous “smart” grid program, with insight from insiders, expert researchers, politicians, doctors, and concerned communities. Transparency advocate Josh del Sol takes us on a journey of revelation and discovery, as he questions corporations’ right to tap our private information and erode our rights in the name of “green”. What you discover will surprise you, unsettle you, and inspire you to challenge the status quo.

Attorney General Eric Holder today announced an Obama Administration policy change on mandatory sentences as they relate to drugs. The new policy includes the “compassionate release” of some prisoners and expanding “at-risk” programs for teens.

“Prisons are operating at 40% above capacity,” he told the audience at the American Bar Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, which was broadcast on C-SPAN.

“Incarceration rates have increased 800% since 1980,” he added, putting over 200,000 people in federal prisons this year. Half of those inmates are incarcerated for drug-related crimes, he said, costing $80 billion a year.

“Our dear protector,” officially Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is stepping down from her careful watch over the nation to take over the University of California system, and leave the job of peddling fear and stoking control to someone else for a while.

What I keep longing to hear, in the hemorrhaging national debate about Edward Snowden, whistleblowing and the NSA, is some acknowledgment of what the word “security” actually means, and what role — if any — the government should play in creating it.

“You can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy.”

A moment of silence, please, for the dying patriarchy. That, of course, was how President Obama explained it to the American public shortly after the spy scandal hit the fan. When did we become “the children” in our relationship with the government, irrelevant to its day-to-day operations, utterly powerless as we stand in its massive, protecting shadow?

As the nation readies itself for its annual celebration of freedom, the modern U.S. government seeking to severely punish hero whistleblower, Bradley Manning, rested its case prosecuting him for 21 charges, including ‘aiding the enemy’ which carries a life sentence. The court martial is being held at Fort Meade in Maryland and is expected to end in August.

Top image: In this June 5, 2013 photo Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is escorted out of a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md., after the third day of his court martial. In June 2010, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning was arrested for giving WikiLeaks more than 700,000 classified battlefield reports, diplomatic cables and video clips while working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Written and Directed by Scott Noble
Narrated by Mikela JayMetanoia Films

From the director of Psywar and Human Resources comes a 5-film series covering the über police state created and developed by America’s secret government. Students of current events get a crash course in the dismantling of what these pathological rulers call quaint: the US Constitution.

Counter-Intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations includes original interviews with:

At its core, the ongoing military trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the admitted conveyer of three-quarters of a million classified U.S. government documents to Wikileaks, is about the evolution of big data into a relentless and almost certainly unstoppable social force. Pfc. Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst arrested in May 2010 and charged with 22 offenses involving the passing of information to Wikileaks, is seen by many as a whistleblower whose actions revealed mendacious covert actions of the U.S. government in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and elsewhere.

1. No man or woman, in or out of government shall initiate force, threat of force or fraud against my life and property and, any and all contracts I am a party to, not giving full disclosure to me, whether signed by me or not, are void at my discretion.

2. I may use force in self-defense against anyone that violates Law 1.

To protect against genetic contamination, a group of ecodefenders destroyed 6,000 genetically modified beets in Jackson County, Oregon earlier this month. The FBI is involved and has deemed the act “economic sabotage,” despite that Syngenta is creating products that economically destroy organic crops through genetic contamination and pesticide aerial drift.

When cross contamination occurs, then our corrupt judicial system blames the victim farmer who is ordered to pay Monsanto for the company’s failure to control its frankenseeds that contaminated her organic crops.

The exposure of the Obama regime’s use of the National Security Agency to secretly spy on the communications of hundreds of millions of US and overseas citizens has provoked world-wide denunciations. In the United States , despite widespread mass media coverage and the opposition of civil liberties organizations, there has not been any mass protest. Congressional leaders from both the Republican and Democratic Parties, as well as top judges, approved of the unprecedented domestic spy program. Even worse, when the pervasive spy operations were revealed, top Senate and Congressional leaders repeated their endorsement of each and every intrusion into all electronic and written communication involving American citizens. President Obama and his Attorney General Holder openly and forcefully defended the NSA’s the universal spy operations.

The issues raised by this vast secret police apparatus and its penetration into and control over civil society, infringing on the citizens freedom of expression, go far beyond mere ‘violations of privacy’, as raised by many legal experts.

This is an action for violations of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the U.S.Constitution. This is also an action for violations of privacy, including intrusion upon seclusion, freedom of expression and association, due process, and other illegal acts.

Thwarting the efforts of a billion-dollar super-secret government spy agency — or anyone else who wants access to your personal information — is not that difficult.

With the recent revelations that the NSA and other agencies have been tapping into corporate streams of data that can provide them with massive amounts of private information about U.S. citizens, now is a good time to start thinking about how best to keep your private information private.

The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

Food rights activists from around North America will meet at the Sauk County Courthouse in this tiny town on May 20 to support Wisconsin dairy farmer Vernon Hershberger and food sovereignty. Hershberger, whose trial begins that day, is charged with four criminal misdemeanors that could land this husband and father in county jail for up to 30 months with fines of over $10,000.